


Farewell

by carriecmoney



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Western, M/M, Mythology - Freeform, Orpheus and Eurydice Myth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-22
Updated: 2014-10-22
Packaged: 2018-02-22 03:32:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2492882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carriecmoney/pseuds/carriecmoney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Then he turned to her. It was too soon; she was still in the cavern. He saw her in the dim light, and he held out his arms to clasp her; but on the instant she was gone. She had slipped back into the darkness. All he heard was one faint word, 'Farewell.' "<br/>Orpheus and Eurydice retelling for jeanmarco week: Olympus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Farewell

**Author's Note:**

> Done for the second day of Jeanmarco week: Olympus. Comparative mythology RULES! [tumblr](http://carriecmoney.tumblr.com) [twitter](http://www.twitter.com/carriecmoney)  
> Potential things I reference that you might not know: [Orpheus and Eurydice](http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/webtexts/eurydice/eurydicemyth.html) [Kharon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charon_%28mythology%29) [Calliope](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calliope)  
> [Maasaw](http://www.native-languages.org/skeleton-man.htm) [Ghost Riders In The Sky](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mynzbmrtp9I) [Wild Hunt](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Hunt) [Horseshoe Canyon pictographs](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_Canyon_%28Utah%29) [dust devils](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_devil) [cattle gates](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_grid)

Jean’s mother is called Cali on the stage, but her true name is Calliope and she is as old as the constellations. She even named a few of them, along with her eight sisters, whispering into tunics on starlit nights. Those days are past, though, his mother is quick to say, and it is poison to hold to them.

Sometimes he wishes they’d clung to them just a little harder, though, so they wouldn’t break down at every stoplight town that crosses their Americana path.

The latest in a long line of mechanics strung out along the interstates wipes down his greasy hands with a rag and whistles. “Your girl’s been through a lot.”

“You don’t know the half of it.” Jean kicks a tire on the Volkswagen van that he’d been born and raised in (seriously, he’d been born in it – there was still a stain). “Can you fix her?”

“Maybe. But it’ll take a lot of love, and it’s too late in the day to get started now.” The mechanic smiles at Jean, teeth white in his oil-streaked face. “Can I take you over to the diner as an apology?”

Jean opens his mouth to say that he isn’t hungry and that his aunts don’t eat people food, but the mechanic smiles again. Jean gulps.

“Oh, uh, sure, why not.”

The mechanic’s name is Marco, and it takes him nine days to fix the Muses’ van. It doesn’t even take half that to get Jean out of his pants, backed up against the wall of the shop’s office and grasping. When the van’s purring like it’s ten years old again, Jean sits his mother down on the back fender and stares at his hands.

“Mom. I love you a lot.” He swallows. “I wanna stay here, with Marco.”

Her brown eyes (not as bright as his) soften. “Angel, of course you do.” She wraps an arm around his shoulders and cushions him close. “He’s a good boy.”

“Yeah.” He returns the hug, painful for both. “You’ll be okay without me?”

She laughs, the deep bells of a cathedral. “It’s sweet of you to worry, dear.” The desert wind blows in through the open garage door, hot and dry, the sun stopping at their feet. She pulls out of the hug, hands sliding down Jean’s bare arms. “You know how to find us when you need to?”

“Of course.” He coughs away the scratch in his throat. “Thanks, Mom.”

She tilts her head, strokes the back of her fingers down his cheek, watching them fall. “You are so sweet.” Jean bites his lip and hugs her again.

Life in Marco’s small Arizona town is slow and sedated. People blow in on the tumbleweeds, blow out like his mother and aunts the dawn of the tenth day. Jean helps Marco out at the shop, adding ‘oil changer’ to his growing list of talents, and plays garage serenades for walkersby at dusk. As the son of a Muse, he can write a killer song on the spot, and the mandolin he’d been gifted as a child is scarred but always in tune. He has a constant twitch to play, like the pull to the Muses always tugging at him (but not followed) and the cavity in his chest looking for something bigger than the settled dust of this town. But he has Marco and his sunlit smile – as long as he can find new ways to sing life into it, he can be content.

He never does tell Marco that he is a demigod. He’s never told anyone, as the Muses are nomads and he has never had long enough friendships outside of the van. With them gone, that life seems distant, and the internal pull of their gravity eases as the van rumbles east. Marco asks for stories of his childhood, of his aunts, but never of their origins. Jean mutters about endless pavement and circling men, vultures for the Muses’ attentions, into the blue dark of the desert sky and the dappled dark of Marco’s neck.

It is the end of summer officially, although it lingers far past its right in their corner of Arizona. Marco takes Jean on a hike up the mesa in sight of the town, handfast as a point in three-touch, for the three month anniversary of Jean rolling into town. Jean has some trouble comprehending that – it’s felt like a blink, it’s felt like a star-wrapped night, it’s felt like an ocean of fishing lights. It hasn’t felt like three months – only, already. He hasn’t written nearly half of the songs Marco’s skin whispers about.

They crest the mesa, sweating and scraped, and pause at the edge, breathing hard as they stare over the curved miles of landscape. The desert is not just orange, but cake-layered with reds and tans and yellows up the spires, dotted with sage scrubbrush and split by the asphalt of the highway. From here, the town is a few stucco dots clustered around an intersection, the two roads stuck through it like spits.

They sit on the edge, immortal, knocking their heels on the rock and splitting a bag of trail mix and a Nalgene bottle of water. Jean fluffs out his shirt collar, letting in air to his chest and the metal charm his Aunt Uri had given him years ago sticking in his sweat. The altitude is getting to his head, and to that pocket of god-ness in his chest. He hooks Marco’s swinging ankle, watching an ant-car drive into town.

“Hey.” The ant-car disappears into stucco. “Do you really wanna go back down there?”

Marco turns to him, but Jean keeps his eyes on the town. “Do you really wanna stay up here?”

“No. We could build a house – no.” He grasps for Marco’s hand – Marco finds it for him. “We could go out. The world’s bigger than a few square miles of desert.” Jean squeezes his hand and looks into Marco’s mud-brown eyes (they’re the Mississippi – what’re they doing confined to the Colorado Plateau?) “I could show you.”

Marco smiles, one corner higher than the other. “You could, huh?”

“Yeah. I- I’d, like to.” Jean traces his thumb down the bones of the back of Marco’s hand, sun heavy on his forehead. Jean looks away into the shade, eggshell sky thin above them, cracked by plane trails. Marco’s palm sits sweaty and warm against his. The ant-car drives out of town, heading west into the sun.

“I’ll need to wrap up some things here.” Marco picks out a cashew from the trail mix and pops it in his mouth. “But, sure.”

Jean blinks, grins, laughs. Knocks his face into the damp crevice of Marco’s neck and shoulder. Even there, the sun bakes his happiness into a fuzzy, airy bubble at the back of his throat, bursting out in an _I love you_ that only Marco’s shirt collar hears.

* * *

On the climb down the mesa, Marco’s foot slips into a rattler hole, and he tumbles off, dead before he hits the ground.

* * *

Marco is buried like he died – under a scorching, falling sun with a weight that yanks Jean’s heart right out of his ribcage. Jean’s face is raw in the dust and sand of the September wind, eyes red as he stands opposite the hole in the ground from Marco’s parents, stone in the grief that buries them with their son. Jean feels like the sandstone of the death cliff, pockmarked and streaking, covered in the scars of rockslides that lodge themselves in his throat. His chest is empty, the god-cavity cracked and beating out its blood, its song, onto the hearth of his heart.

Without Marco, he doesn’t belong in this crossroads town. He hadn’t belonged _with_ Marco, but he could have been content. There is no pleasantly painted aboveshop flat anymore, just a blue ceiling that never belonged to him.

Marco’s parents let him stay there out of pity. He lives in it for the seven hours it takes the sun to sink and the town to fall asleep after the funeral, then rides the junker he and Marco had been fixing up their spare time on the north spoke out of town, following the tug of his internal compass home.

He wanders steadily north, playing at bars and truck stops for gas money, but all of his Marco-songs fall flat and off-key. Without the paintbrush skin to lick the words off of, Jean’s voice dries up, and he can only play, eight strings picking out tears and old heartbreaks from his audiences. They feed him as they feed themselves those nights, well and good, but the food heavy in their mouths and hard to swallow past the stones in their throats.

He spends two weeks on the road, winding through rock pillars and long false canyons, curling up in the corners of local-propped diners around his mandolin, the grooves of it his only comfort. When he thinks about it, he assumes he’s following the Muses, as he had the few other times he’d lagged behind the caravan and caught up later. The sense of home is the same, although stronger now, with the size and teeth of a yucca not in bloom. Mostly, he doesn’t think, just presses his callouses to the frets and follows.

It is two weeks on the road when he reaches a dead-end in a road, mouth dry in the northern Utah oven – or is it southern Wyoming now? State lines never really matter to the Muses and their progeny. The dead end is a double gate, cattle and car, and padlocked between two signs – one declaiming it as the Sticks River Ranch, the other warning against trespassers and beware of dog. Jean frowns at it, the fist in his breastbone pulsing as it beats him forward, past the gate. He turns off the car and gets out to inspect the padlock. It’s rusted shut – the paint is chipping off the metal no trespassing sign. Jean sneers and tugs on the lock. It crumbles in Jean’s hands, red shavings in his palms. He dusts them off on his jeans and pushes the gate open – it swings wide, squeaking across the plain.

He goes back to the junker and turns the key – the engine turns over – nothing. Damn. He tries again, but he knows the car is dead like– Well. The car’s done for. He puts on the Stetson Marco’d thrown in the backseat a month ago to keep his ears from frying, slings his mandolin over his shoulder, bandolier-style, and abandons the car, walking on over the cattle gate and down the grass-covered dirt road.

He doesn’t find the dog the gate warned him of. The previously washed-out blue sky hardens to a slate gray as he walks, wind smelling like rain even though he hasn’t seen that since the Muses left Oklahoma. After an hour of walking through nothing but grass and whipping thorns, he arrives at the ranch, old as the hills, bleached wood corrals and a slumped house in front of a lopsided barn. He pauses at the top of the dirt circle, blinking his narrowed eyes at the thin black horses that stand, slack-kneed, in the browning paddocks.

The screen door of the farmhouse waves open, and the tallest man Jean has ever met steps out, dark leather and scuffed denim and a shadowed face. The air of the ranch hangs gray and leaden, hard to breathe. Jean’s been panting since he crossed the cattle gate – he’d thought it was the exercise – but as he blinks away the fog of his grief, he sees thunderheads overhead, heat lightning in them silhouetting strange shapes, of galloping hooves and red eyes. The wind raises the hairs of Jean’s arms. He looks across the circle at the porch-man, who hasn’t moved since stepping out.

“Do you know why I’m here?” Jean calls, the wind carrying his words and the scent of tornado to the porch. A large hand beckons him forward; Jean crosses the circle. He pauses at the bottom of the plank steps and looks up – he still can’t see the porch-man’s face. “I’m just trying to go home.”

“Home is different for you than it used to be, son of Calliope.” The porch-man’s voice rumbles like the unsung thunder, and Jean barely blinks at his mother’s name. “You are being called by a different love now.”

Jean sucks in a breath. “Am I dying, then?”

“No.” The porch-man’s broad hands spread wide. “But you do have a choice.”

Jean’s heart hammers in his hands, his toes, the crown of his head. “Is it to turn around or to keep going? Because that’s a no-brainer, right there.” The hands fold.

“Very well. You will require payment.”

“Oh – you can have my car, it’s sitting by your front gate-” One hand slashes, cutting him off.

“Human possessions mean little. What I seek is far simpler.”

Jean stares at the buttoned cuffs of the hands’ wrists. “You’re Kharon.”

“That is the name your mothers know me as, yes.” Jean tries again to look into his face and makes out a stubbled chin. “It is not the only.”

“Oh. Wait, shit, hang on.” He takes off the Stetson and tosses it to a step and unslings the chain from his neck with the charm his Aunt Uri gave him, a beaten silver disc with a woman’s worn profile pressed on it.

( _It was mine, she’d winked as she put it over his head and kissed his forehead. Let it guide you._ )

Now, Jean holds it up by the chain, silver sucking in the little light around it. “Is this what you want?”

The mouth above the stubbled chin falls open – are there even teeth in there? “Yes, that will do nicely.” The porch-man extends a large hand; Jean stretches up to sling the charm into it. (His feet refuse to touch the steps.)

Jean licks his lips. “So, where do I go from here?”

“You will not go alone.” The porch-man weaves his fingers together, Aunt Uri’s medallion winking away. “The river is dry, so I can no longer ferry. But that is what the horses are for.”

As one, the skinny black horses lift their heads from the dead grass and look towards the porch-man. Jean backs up a step, eyes twitching around. “Oh, well, I’ve never actually ridden a horse before.”

“No matter. The horses know the way.” He whistles, sharp and long, and one of them separates from the left herd, the gate of the paddock springing open before them and clanging shut almost on their tail. The horse walks up to the wooden step-stool in the beaten circle before the house and waits – a mounting block. Jean stares at the horse, the weight of his actions slamming down on his shoulders. “She will lead you well.”

“Right.” Jean takes in a deep breath, holds it, lets it out. “How long will it take?”

“As long as it must.” The hands fold away into the shadows of the porch. “You should get moving.”

Jean swallows. “Yessir.” He walks to the mounting block, but pauses before he climbs up and turns back to the porch-man, bowing his head. “Thank you.” The porch-man smiles, teeth glinting – there are teeth after all.

Jean mounts the horse, bareback, and works his fingers in her mane as she plods between the paddock and the house to the dry riverbed extending behind the ranch. Jean has seen horses before, seen their walk and the way their riders sway with the gait – but these aren’t really horses. The flesh under him bounces and bobs not like a walk, but like a wave, one step short of water spraying his face.

The horse-boat follows the dry riverbed down, down, to where it cuts harder into the plains and its walls rise. The grasslands retreat, and all Jean is left with is sandstone that doesn’t ring with the horse-boat’s hooves and piles of red sand. The first crack of thunder comes when the shadows cast by the dead riverbanks hit Jean’s ankles, the boom echoing down the riverbed – the canyon, now. Jean looks up, swinging his mandolin around to his front to protect it from the rain, but the clouds are dry, just a cloak. He tilts his head back as far as it will go.

There is a herd of cattle up there, each heifer the size of a house, snorting and stomping, red eyes hazy beacons in the clouds, steel hooves winking as they stampede down the canyon, leading the way down. Jean breathes in the hot, musky air as they pass, the strings digging into his palm the only thing confirming his mortality. Are they really cows, or something stranger?

The herd thunders along, chased by smoking figures with their own elkhorn and fangs, too big, too high to notice the ant-Jean clopping on below. Jean’s eyes follow them down the crack of the canyon, shaking fingers finding chords that get sucked away by the devil’s herd’s passage.

The herd moves on, but their hooves make eddies in the canyon depths, little dust devils that spin up and pull leaves off sagebrush and sandy grass. Jean and the horse-boat pick their way down the riverbed, Jean’s mandolin playing of its own will. It makes a bubble of safe sound around him, warding off the biting tornadoes and the bitter, ageless stare of the round-shouldered ghosts imprinted on the horizontal stripes of the canyon. He’s just playing nonsense, no song written by human or by god, but he’s scared to stop.

The sun sets, gone from Jean’s sight long before the stars appear. The horse-boat can see in the dark – the horse-boat has no eyes – Jean’s fingers ache. His mouth is dry, another flick of sand in this hundred-mile wasteland. He shivers in the sunless desert chill, hunching his shoulders – the horse-boat offers no warmth. His fingers are bleeding.

He can only see three stars now, the top of the canyon is so far away. The horse-boat rounds a bend.

Nestled between two willows at the dead-end, there is a house – more of a hut, round and mud-stuck, a ring of smoke swirling out of the middle of the thatched roof. Corn grows in rings around it, ears sprouting silk. The horse-boat doesn’t stop until it reaches the mirror mounting block from the porch-man’s circle. The mandolin releases Jean when the hooves rest, and he slides off the horse-boat’s back, legs shaking. The horse-boat is cold and smooth as driftwood, but Jean’s bloody fingers linger on its false flank as he blinks around at the canyon end. There are layers and layers of the round-shouldered ghosts, dark on light and light on dark, noon to vespers shadow lengths. The ground is the same sand, but it slopes down behind the willows and the corn and the hut to disappear into a void cavern – the long-ago descent of the Sticks River into the earth. The mandolin’s humming strings are the only sounds in this socket.

No one comes out of the house to greet him, like the porch-man did. The god-cavity is thrumming now, a war drum honing on the dark hole of the doorway, covered by a woven rug. Jean’s watery knees hold as he takes the few steps from the horse-boat’s side to the rug-door.

The rug-door’s pattern is stationary, but Jean reads the rise of the gods in it, the crawl of human up from world to world, the meeting of the First Man and First Woman over their cookfires – he blinks, shakes his head, mind spinning. It’s just a rug. He bats it aside with his mandolin and ducks in.

The inside of the hut is cluttered with plants, growing along the walls, hanging from the rafters, lumped on the floor, the scent of too many flowers clogging up Jean’s nose – rotting flowers, thick and sweet. He coughs.

A mound of vines dumped by the open hole in the ground where the smoke drifts from shifts. He jumps back, and the vines shake away, curling back from a redheaded woman with a mother’s face and dirt down her front. Jean clutches his mandolin to his chest as she brushes off a last moonflower, the vines retreating into the packed earth at her side, her bare feet cushioned by grass and dandelions. She sees Jean and smiles.

“Welcome, son of Calliope. Sorry, I think I fell asleep.” She shakes out her skirts, denim or linen or leather, dusting pollen across the floor.

Jean stares. “What are _you_?” His voice is raspy.

She laughs like birdsong. “Now that is a complicated question.” She sticks her hand in the smoke and watches it funnel around her fingers. “There are some languages that have no need of me. There are some that pray for me.” She spreads her fingers, rotates her arm on its spit. “Not all embody.” Jean blinks, and she is smoke as well, white and heavy – blinks again, she is a woman. She pulls out her hand and smiles at Jean again, eyes Missouri mud, teeth green. “Your mothers know me as Persephone, or Proserpina.”

He frowns. “If you have so many faces, then why do my mothers only have the one? Have they been lying to me?”

Persephone shakes her head, hands falling to her sides, dandelion heads at her feet turning to her fingers like the east. She glows, he sees now. “Your mothers have few other corporeal guises, unlike spring and life and death.” She tilts her head, considering him with a mint smile. “They prefer their corporeality.”

“Oh.” He lets his mandolin fall to the care of the neckstrap. “Do you know why I’m here?”

She sweeps around to one side of the hut, grass and weeds following her steps, death in her wake. “There are only two reasons the living show up at my doorstep.” There’s a window above her head when she bends to work; Jean stares out of it at a coin-sheen sea. “Because they have lost, or because they are lost.” She looks over her shoulder at him – her eyes have no pupils, two slaps of mud on canvas. “Are you both?”

His dry mouth fails him. He nods. She sits on the thing she’s been pulling at – a moss mattress – and pats the spot next to her. He crosses the round hut and sits, mandolin in his lap. Her mud-slap eyes smile at him. “All right. Tell me about them.”

He swallows, the sides of his throat scraping on themselves, but he know enough from his mother’s tales not to ask for water. His fingers find his strings instead, dried blood flaking off to be snapped up by the lichen.

Jean plays Marco back into existence, his Mississippi eyes and his sunshine smile, the motor oil under his fingernails, his bad knee and the freckles on his wrists and the puckered scar below his elbow from an overheated radiator. He closes his eyes and sits on the edge of the mesa again, slippery ankles locked and the crossed swords of the highways thrown down across the desert, north-south, east-west. A hot wind blows across his wet face – he’s crying. He lets it pour (he hasn’t cried yet, not since the event itself), tears dripping into the blood puddle on the moss between his knees. He can hear the echoes of his past Marco-songs in this one, calls to themselves that reverberate into nothings, all of them mixed together. His scabs from the horse-boat journey have torn open again, slicking up the coiled metal strings. He doesn’t hit all his notes, for the first time since he learned to play. The blood is ruining his strings – he stops, slick red hands falling to his sides. Soft fingers wipe at his cheeks. He blinks his eyes open to Persephone’s mother face, eyes not as bright as his, although they’re crying, too, cloudy drops of old water. She thumbs aside his tears.

“Now that’s plum gorgeous.” Jean turns his head in Persephone’s hands to the new voice, dark and tricksy. There’s a Native American in the smoking hole in the ground, arms crossed on the brink and chin resting on their forearms. Their hair is falling out of their horsetail into their glittering eyes of full silver that flash in the glow of Persephone. They grin, showing pointed teeth. “You’re Calliope’s boy, aren’t you? I heard she had another one.”

Jean nods, staring at the hole-god. When was the last time Jean had seen something mortal?

Persephone’s hands fall from his face; he clutches at them, glow sipping at his wounds. She sucks in a breath and yanks away, standing to shake a handkerchief from her skirts, a raw cotton square that eat Jean’s blood instead. Jean watches red sink into dirty white, then looks at the hole-god, head tilted on their elbow. “Do you know why I’m here?”

The hole-god sighs and pouts at Persephone. “Pet, why do we never get visitors who just wanna say hi?” Persephone shakes her head, focused on siphoning Jean’s blood from his hands. The hole-god smiles, eyes pointless but they look at Jean. “Why do you think you’re here?”

Jean licks his chapped lips. “Marco. Is Marco here? Is he okay?”

“There are a lot of Marcos in my world, son of Calliope.” The hole-god raises an eyebrow, silver eyes shining. Jean stops breathing as his vision narrows to molten mercury – the hole-god blinks. “But only one you’ve seen die.” Jean’s hands are shaking in Persephone’s loose hold. The hole-god sighs and resettles their arms. “You know, I can’t be in the habit of just handing dead people back to Life. I’ve got an image to maintain.” A bird escapes Jean’s god-cavity. “I don’t have the power to make a body, either, it’s not in my jurisdiction.” They wink at Persephone. “That’s a job for Life.”

“Yes.” Persephone is still crying when she looks up from Jean’s clean hands at the hole-god. “Yes.” The hole-god closes their eyes.

“Darling, you are soft.” Persephone floats to her feet, kisses Jean’s brow, sight disconnected from her eyes. She slips around the smoke to Jean’s blind spot – the god-cavity hums as her glow grows from yellow to white. Jean ducks his head from it and locks to the silver of the hole-god. They beckon him closer with two fingers. The hole-god has reed sleeves and a striped parka, black and white and green. “Which me do you see?”

Jean opens his mouth to question. “Maasaw.”

The hole-god nods. “Marco’s me. I thought so.” A silver shimmer; their red skin melts to pale, their eyes sink into their skull. A huff, and the color snaps back. “Who you see tells us more than what you say.” They drum their fingers on their forearm, a gallop. “You saw Kharon, you saw Persephone, but now you see Maasaw.” _D-d-duh, d-d-duh, d-d-duh_. “Stick your hands in the smoke.”

Jean swallows and weaves his fingers together, making a cup as he kneels and obeys. The smoke bends away from his hands, phobic to his touch. He frowns, narrowing his eyes. The hole-god laughs. “Patience, kid.”

Jean sneers at the smoke stream and holds his position, an empty cup. On the other side of the smoke, Persephone’s glow is brilliant, pulsing and silent. Jean blinds himself staring into it.

A wisp of smoke curls out of the column and pools in Jean’s hands. He breathes through his nose as he watches it roll. It’s the only warm thing he’s touched since he left his car behind – even Persephone is chilled, a light without heat.

“Bring him here,” Persephone calls. Jean shivers and shuffles around the smoke-hole, transfixed by the spin and roil of the smoke, Persephone’s glow receding from his feet. “Close your eyes, Jean.”

Names always hold power.

Jean closes his eyes and lets the weightless smoke lead him. Soft hands cup his.

“I can make life,” Persephone says, a breath to his ears, “but humankind are complex. They need time before they become true. Let go, Jean.” He unlaces his fingers, and the smoke falls into Petra’s hands. “He will follow you as he grows, but his form is not meant for mortal eyes. You must wait until the true sun touches him before turning to him.” She steps away. “Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Turn around, Jean.” He spins on his heel. “The sun is coming. Go.”

He nods, sightless. “Will I see you again?”

He feels her smile envelop him, a mother’s hug. “In your own time.” His feet take him through the rug-door.

He can open his eyes again when he’s outside of the hut, the compulsion of his name on god’s lips disintegrated. There is a sore, empty spot in the wall of ghosts.

He mounts the horse-boat, hands grasping at the illusion of wood sides. The horse-boat resumes its plodding pace, bobbing back up the canyon, faster now that it’s headed home. Jean can’t see a damn thing in this night, but the noises make up for it, the whistling of dust devils, the moaning of the painted figures as they wave with old river currents, the faraway thunder of the devil’s herd, the shrieks of the wind in Jean’s face. His fingers burn like his throat, but even touching the strings of his mandolin makes him cry in yellow pain. His protective bubble from the trip down refuses to form, so all of the death canyon elements tear at him for hours.

The only sound he can’t hear is Marco following.

The canyon starts to slope up at false dawn. The sky is still low and bleak, even as Jean and the horse-boat rise to meet it. He winds his fingers tighter in the seaweed mane. The end of his road isn’t the plain of the dead Sticks River, but the gate of the ranch. There is no warmth, no true sun, this side of the cattle gate.

He tries to kick the horse-boat faster, but his heels find no give in this flesh, the grass rolling over the horse-boat’s hooves with no discernible roots. He would not survive this grass.

The porch-man is waiting when he arrives at the mounting block, but Jean almost rolls off the horse-boat’s back when it stops, falling to his knees in the dust, mandolin clanging against his chest. He vaults to his feet, hands leaving dark red streaks in the dirt as he runs down the road, lungs heaving, don’t look back, don’t look back-

The two miles from the ranch to the gate are the worst. Jean isn’t a runner, he’s never learned how to lengthen his stride and find a pattern to his panting. The death air doesn’t feed his lungs like it should. His body screams for water, he’s been in the arid Utah-Wyoming heat without a drop for a day. He stumbles, he’s crying, he runs.

The split log fence rolls up the horizon. He sobs. He can see the junker, still stalled out next to the open gate. His senses have overloaded him, all too much and blanking each other out. He feels his legs pounding the dirt; he hears his blood pounding his ears.

He clatters over the cattle gate. The heat of the desert hits him with a punch, the morning sun blaring in his face (his Stetson is still on the porch-man’s front steps). He collapses on the hood of the junker, face-first, wheezing, laughing. He flips over, laughter soda bubbles, and sits on the fender, smiling back down the road.

Marco is standing on the cattle gate, brown and white and green. Jean’s grin freezes as he stares at the morning glory blooming where Marco’s right eye should be.

“No.” Jean tumbles forward as the bloom withers. “ _No!_ ”

The last vine still clinging to Marco’s head peels away, its feelers tearing open a hole for mud to fall out after it. Marco’s skin deflates like a ripped feedbag. Marco’s left eye, intact, widens, his mouth opens, his hand grasps. Jean catches it, but it turns to dust in his bloody hand.

Marco-dirt slips through Jean’s fingers and the steel bars of the cattle gate. Jean is still breathless from the sprint, he is choking on too rich air and saline. He snaps a morning glory, and Marco is gone again. Jean’s sweat, blood, and tears follow him down the hole.

* * *

Jean is alone, with a dead car, a dead flower, and a wisp of smoke dissipating into the desert wind.


End file.
